I RING THE DOORBELL IN YOUR MIND BUT IT'S LOCKED FROM THE OUTSIDE
Me and Travis realized we needed to get out of our neighborhood if we wanted to taste reality, so we started taking the city bus downtown. Orlando’s public image is squeaky-clean but we immediately encountered a freakish underbelly at the downtown bus transfer station. Homeless people would ride the bus all day just to get in the air conditioning, and various under-employed citizens, including us, would breathe the same exhaust-flavored air.
Just to get on the bus was an odyssey of boredom. The stop closest to my house was a twenty minute walk with hourly bus service, which never arrived on time, and we were forever sitting there on the curb waiting and smoking cigarettes. Regular people would drive by and we would curse them for not giving us a ride, but we were never bold enough to hitchhike.
One Saturday we were trying to go to the record store across town, sitting forever at the bus stop, counting the blades of grass. It was generally a pretty sleepy street and the stop was on a curve, but we heard a car coming and Travis stuck out his thumb. To me this was a joke because obviously nobody would ever stop, but unbelievably an old muscle car needing a paint job pulled over just ahead. Travis says “Watch them peel out when I try to walk over there,” but he walks over and ends up leaning in to the passenger window with his arm on the roof, chatting. He gives me the eyebrow, I walk over, and it’s two girls driving around listening to Dinosaur Jr. and doing nothing. Travis, ever smooth, says “You’re probably headed over to Waxtrax and want to give us a ride?” and they were like “Haha, sure,” so we all went to the cool record store to hang out and not buy anything.
The driver was Debbie, a pretty tomboy car-mechanic type, and her friend Rachel, a self-conscious redhead with bangs and freckles. The car smelled like motor oil, soured milk, and musty leather, and the music and muffler were both loud, so we could barely talk to these girls from the backseat. We learned they were a little older and from a high school on the outskirts of town, near the swampland where they built Disney World. Foreign land.
We loitered at the record store until we got bored. Debbie said “Why don’t we go to my house? I have a joint in my room, and then we can go smoke it in the swamp?” We all piled back into her Pontiac and drove forever, beyond the edge of town, and suddenly turned into her little gated community where all the houses looked like they were designed on the same afternoon. We pulled into her driveway and she cut the ignition and turned around from the driver's seat. “My mom has been acting a little funny lately,” she said. “My whole life she has had long straight hair down to her feet, and would spend hours washing it, drying it, brushing it, snipping split ends, and so on. Without mentioning it, on Sunday she went out and got a really short pageboy haircut, put on a bikini, and hasn’t taken it off since, even to go to the grocery store. She’s been, like, aggressively cheery and I’m afraid she’s gonna crack. Anyway, I’ll have to introduce you and you’ll have to hang out with her while I go find the joint, ok?”
“Dang, can’t we just stay in the car?” Travis says.
“Nope!” she says cheerily.
Travis eyerolls, but we go inside, and there she is: Debbie’s mom, looking like a mini-model in a lime green bikini. “Oh!” she says. “Friends!” and hugs us both in turn, which was nice but a little familiar.
Debbie disappears and her hyper mom goes straight into the kitchen and instantly turns around with four glasses of Sunny Delight on a tray. “Have some juice and come sit with me by the pool!”
We dutifully follow her to the pool, both wearing combat boots in her pastel home. Just as the chitchat starts, Debbie emerges, saying “Mom, has Jeff been in my room? I wanted to play a tape for these guys and it’s gone!” She stares at us and makes the throat-slash gesture. “Oh well, I think my brother stole the ‘tape’,” she says.
We politely finish our drinks, her mom hugs us again, and Debbie gives us a ride home.
When we’re hauling ourselves out of the backseat, Rachel says “Hey, my dad works for Disney, I can get us in for free. We should all go and drop acid sometime.”